A fingerprint - but whose?

October 2 2012

Pictures: BG

A piece of interesting evidence that didn't make it into the programme on our Henrietta Maria was the appearance of two fingerprints beneath the 18th Century over-paint. One was in the hair (below), and the other (above) was a thumb print at the bottom edge of the canvas, as if someone had picked up the still wet painting with their hand on the stretcher bar, but their thumb on the bottom of the canvas - just as you would if it was propped up against a wall, or against other pictures.

Now before you start groaning, none of us ever thought we could say that these were Van Dyck's fingerprints. That whole area of forensic analysis is sadly too discredited. But it was interesting nonetheless, and suggested that, certainly in the softer brown pigments of the hair, the layer of original paint we reached was relatively intact. Had the picture been massively over-cleaned and abraded in the past, the soft impasto of a finger-print would most likely have been removed. 

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